Can 400 iso film blow up real big, real well?

[Leigh]

... the bigger the print, the farther away the viewer is likely to be.

If assumptions were dollars (or euros), we would have a very rich membership indeed.

Viewers will get as close to a print as they can without falling off of something or getting arrested.

- Leigh

[Kirk Gittings]

Yes Leigh. The myth of the standard viewing distance is just that.

[Peter Gomena]

Rent bigger lights!

[Daniel Stone]

Buy a box of each 400 speed film(Portra 400, Tmax 400, and Ilford HP5+), and do some testing.

Answers from others who merely show you a 60dpi web-sized srgb jpeg that's highly compressed will NOT show you what you need to hear/see. Only YOUR eyes and brain can make that decision based on what you see.

Buy some film and do some testing. What works for one person might be found despicable by another...

-Dan

[IanG]

The simple answer is that the advantage of the extra two stops of a 400 ISO emulsion will give you that increase in depth of field you require and the trade off is slightly more grain.

My own experience using HP5 is that 5x4 negatives stand up very well enlarged and shown alongside images shot on 100 ISO emulsions in my case Delta 100 (or APX100/Tmax100 in the past).

As has already been said you need to try it for yourself. I never considered using a fast emulsion (in LF) until I found I had no other option when shooting hand-held, but it works for me.

Ian

[polyglot]

Poly, for color I've only used Fuji RDP 100 and it came out great.

Sounds like you're scanning rather than optically printing then. That changes things somewhat because you will get grain aliasing in some situations that will make (some) grain look worse than it is. Depends on the scanner as to which films will be affected in which way.

If you liked RDP then you will be ecstatic with the resolution of Ektar, but the saturation & contrast are high if you're printing optically. It's fine if you scan it and adjust curves digitally though.

If you're scanning and care only about smoothness and not about resolution, then you can digitally erase (denoise) all of the grain from a faster film. Your print will be perfectly grain-free, just without quite as much fine detail as is present in a Tmax 100 shot.

tmy2 is tri x 400?, what is 7x 8 enlargement in inches? What about Tmax 100 vs Tmax 400?

TMY2 is Tmax 400. 8x enlargement means exactly that, the print is 8x larger than the negative. So for a 4x5", 8x enlargement is approximately 32x40" (with some variation because the active area of the film isn't really 4x5" and you also lose some space on the borders of your print). If you want a 60" print from 5" film, you need 12x enlargement.

Hp5 is Ilford? so don't not blow up as good as Kodak? then why use it?

HP5+ is somewhat similar to Tri-X (a traditional cubic-grain emulsion), which is not at all similar to Tmax (tabular grain emulsion). Ilford's competitors to Tmax are called Delta, but sadly you can't get Delta 400 in sheets.

People use them because they have a different look, a different H-D curve. Sometimes people also like to see a little more grain, or they're printing small enough (16x20") that there is no visible grain even from these coarser emulsions, and the look becomes more important.

Good idea about shooting at 800, can go from f/ 8 to, 22 just by using different film, but when go big, and push, wonder if that will look bad? compared to straight tmax 100?

I'm shooting no diffusers for these projects.

It will definitely look visibly grainier than Tmax 100. Shooting at 800 will give more contrast, but if you're expecting that then you can probably adjust your lighting ratios appropriately and keep it all well under control. I wouldn't hesitate (on technical grounds) to exhibit a big print from TMY2 though, it's about the best speed/grain tradeoff you are going to find. And it's all meaningless in the face of the quality of your image content.

You will have to test for yourself; no amount of handwaving on the internet can substitute for going out and exposing a few frames and printing them.

[RMiksell]

Have you considered using flashbulbs? A used grafllite flashgun can be had for a song on Ebay, and GE#5 bulbs can be found for less than $0.20 each if you buy in quantity. I've yet to have one fail to fire. Keeping shutter speeds less than 1/30th of a second shouldn't be an issue for portraiture. If you need more light just go for bigger bulbs. You'll need to calculate exposure from the guide numbers and maybe do a few test exposures to get a feel for working with the bulbs. I've also found the blue coated ones give excellent results for daylight balanced film as well if you're shooting color. You can also string 2 or more of the flashguns together if needed.

As for downsides, I haven't tried adapting them to light modifiers other than the standard reflectors yet, but you should be able to fit them into a softbox. Other downside is you need to change the bulb after each shot. Not really a big deal for large format, we tend to take our time with our shots anyways.

As for experience with 400 speed films and grain, I've shot TMY2, scanned at 4000dpi with 13um aperature, viewed at 100% grain is visible but very fine. Much finer the HP5 scanned at 2000 dpi. I haven't shot TMX yet so I'm not certain how it compares with that. I still have some efke ort 25 in 8x10 I want to test as well. I haven't attempted printing that large optically so I can't comment on that yet.


-Ryan